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CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

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Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#61

Post by omgJustTest »

This article does not mention the WHO offered tests to the US before the CDC decided it should make its own[1]. This alone should have been enough to bring impeachment charges against public officials, for criminal neglect.

If the WHO had proven these in China, and you have no other alternative, it make sense to do both 1. buy tests you know are in active use and 2. make your own tests if needed.

Someone at the CDC must have been asleep or was ignored. China was shut down for weeks, the port of LA didnt have 25% of its normal volume in February and the WHO was shipping tests to over 60 countries _at the end of February_.

EDIT#1: I also emailed Dr Fauci a full week before about the short sightedness of allowing cruise ships to continue operating and while he was claiming "if you are healthy, they are fine". His office returned my mail a few days ago with a blanket "Dr Fauci is busy, and appreciates your comments" email.

EDIT#2: There is a more nuanced version of this discussion in the comments below. It is technically not correct to say the "WHO offered the US tests", the more technical distinction would be the "WHO supported leading research from Berlin, and the CDC did not. This decision lead to a delay in tests that did not have a higher number of false positives... (etc). The US generally has resources to produce these tests, and would not rely on the WHO." Either way, a test existed and the US could have chosen to take a more conservative stance by adopting the research and producing its own simulatneously. The Chinese economy was shutdown.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing...

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#62

Post by wool_gather »

paulmd wrote: post #59
tunesmith wrote: post #2

This whole line of analysis has confused me. The CDC tests, while flawed, were never very numerous, right? Is the contention that if these early tests had worked, they actually would have been sufficient to protect the entire nation? It's seemed to me the problem has more been that we haven't stockpiled supplies over the past few years like South Korea did.

The problem is that the CDC didn't use the tests WHO had developed, and stonewalled states and private labs from developing their own testing, while they fucked around developing their own tests. OK, fine, if the CDC wants their own tests, whatever. The WHO tests were not the be-all end-all of testing. There was clearly room for improvement on test speed for example. I have seen this called out as something that spec…

Small correction: It wasn't the CDC preventing other tests from being used -- that's not their job. It was the FDA.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#63

Post by munk-a »

grey-area wrote: post #46
nohat wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exponentially easier to respond to an outbreak the earlier you act, but our early response was hamstrung by the CDC and FDA (and complete apathy from the white house). We could have slowed or halted this in the early stages with better testing. At the least it would have confirmed how much community spread there already was and hopefully prodded the gov, states, and businesses into action sooner. Time matters. I…

This lacklustre response is still going on, the federal government simply isn’t taking this seriously. Trump saying things will open up in just a few weeks and it’s important to restart the economy will cost thousands of lives by encouraging states not to lock down. Full lock down is now the only way out, and as it has spread, that will take months. Testing needs to massively ramp up too. 2000 people died in one day…

Suggesting a resumption of normal work and not calling for more laggardly states to get their acts in order has been immensely irresponsible. Additionally he's reaffirmed the benefits of Plaquenil/Chloroquinine and already one self-medicator has died from improvising a supply[1].

Don't expect the federal government to start acting intelligently anytime soon.

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/man-dies-after-in...

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#65

Post by Svip »

omgJustTest wrote: post #61

This article does not mention the WHO offered tests to the US before the CDC decided it should make its own[1]. This alone should have been enough to bring impeachment charges against public officials, for criminal neglect. If the WHO had proven these in China, and you have no other alternative, it make sense to do both 1. buy tests you know are in active use and 2. make your own tests if needed. Someone at the CDC m…

To clarify. The WHO did not offer the US tests. The Politico article just says that the US was not on the list of countries it offered tests. It never offers the US tests, because it has national labs that can make their own tests. The WHO only gives tests to countries who do not have a national infrastructure of their own to build tests.

But the WHO did recommend the Berlin tests, as it had no false positives, and was quickly able to isolate the virus from other coronaviruses, something the initial CDC test was not able to.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/16/joe-biden/...

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#66

Post by cadlin »

roenxi wrote: post #43
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, the FDA did not allow anyone other than the CDC to test for coronavirus. true > there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups. also true All of it is completely true. And the issue is that both of these were blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention to the situation. The CDC was struggling to develop the test, and the FDA regulates who can create tests under normal circumstances. The larger ques…

> Everyone saw the CDC couldn't scale up in time. Everyone knew the FDA regulation... No way that is possibly true. People realised they didn't have tests. A bunch of people of a liberterian bent or systems thinkers would have picked the FDA as the problem very quickly. But for most people diagnosing and rectifying that sort of snarl in a complex bureaucratic process would have taken about as long as it did. This hap…

Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the stock market, which is where the response concentrated.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#67

Post by watwut »

tosser0001 wrote: post #26

I just don't see what good is going to come out of worrying about this right now while the world is on fire. Everybody needs to be thinking about how to help in the coming weeks, anything else is a waste of time and mental energy. There will be plenty of time to analyze what went wrong with the initial response when things calm down. This is just raising the level of angst unnecessarily in my opinion.

The good is that next week when same issue will be about to happen, people able to push back will be in better position to push back and there will be more pressure on them to push back.

What happened once will happen again.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#68

Post by UncleOxidant »

lisper wrote: post #41
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, the FDA did not allow anyone other than the CDC to test for coronavirus. true > there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups. also true All of it is completely true. And the issue is that both of these were blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention to the situation. The CDC was struggling to develop the test, and the FDA regulates who can create tests under normal circumstances. The larger ques…

> The larger question is why the heck didn't the administration seeing what was going, on step in, and say this is an emergency situation, allow private testing! At the risk of getting overly political for HN, it seems to me that the answer to that should be pretty obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention over the last three years: this administration has an active disdain for expertise of any kind. The on…

> The only remaining question is whether the current situation will cause any of Trump's supporters to question the wisdom of valuing loyalty above all else (and particularly above competence). If not, then this is just the beginning of our pain.

Trump supporters aren't great at critical thinking - that's why we're in this mess. I'm pretty sure a large majority of them will buy the con that it was the previous administration's fault, or it was china's fault, or it was those pesky Democrat's fault, or it's only like the flu so why panic? Or all of the above. That and he'll convince'em that the checks that are coming are from him personally and isn't he just great for sending'em out?

Yeah, we could still be in for trouble in November.

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#69

Post by Retric »

wool_gather wrote: post #45
shaggyfrog wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is heavily biased towards a US-centric worldview. Different parts of the world are burning, or burning out, at different rates... so it’s not so much about “worrying about this right now” but “what lessons can one part of the globe learn from another that is a few days/weeks/months ahead”

The article is by a U.S. institute about a problem that only affects the U.S. There's nothing for the rest of the world to learn...they already did it right by using the WHO test.

Several countries are in similar situations. For example Iceland‘s recent order for more tests got scaled back to 2,000 from 5,000. But unlike the US their acting like the situation is worse than it appears to be to try and limit spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_I...

Re: CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

#70

Post by robocat »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
45ure wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you by any chance describing the Swiss cheese model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

Yes! It’s overused, but very useful when communicating the idea.

The US response to Covid19 is nothing like the Swiss cheese model.

The Swiss cheese model is a perfect storm of unlikely failures that leads to a negative outcome, a failure that slips through multiple safety nets and checks. A real “Swiss cheese failure” reads like a bizarre set of coincidences within a highly rational system of disaster prevention controls, with a unique outcome that never gets repeated again - like some plane accidents where every level of check/balance has had a miss.

Other countries have not failed (Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, China) which shows that rational actions could prevent this.

Many other countries have failed (Italy, Spain, US, Iran, etc) which shows this isn’t a Swiss cheese model.

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